Gaming Thursday

November 20, 2014

As you may have guessed from the fact that our group has moved on to our new D&D campaign, we have paused our Star Wars game. At the end of this post, I’ll regale you with the fabulous end to the last adventure and the amazing humour and moments of excitement that was had. Before that though, is that along with the end of the game, so too has our foray into the FFG’s new SW system come to an end. To quote one player: “Next game, I’m moving on to the d6 system. I don’t know if you guys are, but I am.” And he’s never even played the d6 game.

In the end, the system never gelled for us at all. Three of us in the group are long time RPGers, and two of us are fiddly gearheads and system enthusiasts. I’ve played some dozen different RPG systems over the years, from the simple to the complex. And yet the FFG system never got smooth. There’s bits of the system that interact with other bits scattered all throughout the book, such that needing to find something sent you scrambling around. I made up one very large tactical range map and game aid, that included many rules bits collected onto a single 30″x42″ sheet placed on the table for use and easy reference, and that only helped a little. Despite claiming over and over to be a “narrative first” system, there is a lot of crunch in many areas, and different portions appear to have been written by different people. (We later read rumours that the game itself was quite rushed, which could explain it…) It sapped our enjoyment of our playing time.

Even the nifty dice system didn’t seem to work out all as wonderful as I’d first envisioned it to be. As I mentioned in a previous post, the advantage/disadvantage system ended up usually being just one more fiddly bit to keep track of, and/or was so wildly fluctuating and frequent that it began to lose its meaning. The damage and healing system for the characters also made combat lose its meaning as well, leading to a feeling that was unlike what I’d expect from the SW universe.

The saving grace for us was the use of destiny points, though even there we used them only in the manner that made the most sense: introducing bits into the narrative. And that is what made the last session excellent. The players, already a battered, were being brought down heavily in a fight in none other than the Mos Eisley Cantina. No less than three destiny points were used in that battle by the players… one to have one character, just shot and going down unconscious, land on a stim pack of their medic droid to get healed rather than go down… and that same droid would later be blown to smithereens, but a second destiny point would have him explode artistically such that his remaining stim packs flew off to stick into the characters and heal them more.

The pièce de résistance however was, at a grim grim moment, one player throwing their last destiny point to me and saying “an unexpected ally comes to our aid.” I thought hard… who should it be? There was only one choice: the anthropomorphic rabbit alien girl, coming to avenge the death of her father’s murder from earlier in the adventure. With a vibro sword.